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“Can all personnel be gathered onto one or two ships?” Dongfang Yanxu said aloud, but her voice was only meant to guide the direction of their eye communication.

Impossible.

Impossible.

Impossible. There are too many people. Environmental and hibernation systems can’t accommodate them all. If present capacity is boosted even a little, it will be disastrous.

“So, is it clear now?” Dongfang Yanxu’s voice resounded in the empty white space like the mutterings of someone deeply asleep.

Clear.

Clear.

Some people must die, or everyone will die.

Then their eyes went silent. The three of them felt an intense desire to turn away, as if shaken by thunder from the depths of the universe that made their souls quake in terror. Dongfang Yanxu was the first to stabilize her own gaze.

“Stop it,” she said.

Stop it.

Don’t give up.

Don’t give up?

Don’t give up! Because no one else has given up. If we give up, then we’ll be expelled from the Garden of Eden.

Why us?

Of course, it shouldn’t be them, either.

But someone has to be expelled. The Garden of Eden has a limited capacity.

We don’t want to leave the garden.

So we can’t give up!

Three pairs of eyes, so close to breaking apart, locked together again.

Infrasonic H-bomb.

Infrasonic H-bomb.

Infrasonic H-bomb.

Every ship is equipped with them.

It’s hard to defend against a stealth launch.

Their gazes separated temporarily as their minds were pushed to the brink of collapse. They needed rest. When the three pairs of eyes met once again, they were uncertain and erratic, like candles flickering in the wind.

Evil!

Evil!

Evil!

We’ll become devils!

We’ll become devils!

We’ll become devils!

“But… what are they thinking?” Dongfang Yanxu asked softly. To the two vice-captains, her voice, while soft, seemed to linger uninterrupted in the white space, like the buzz of a mosquito.

Yes. We don’t want to become devils, but who knows what they’re thinking.

Then we’re already devils, or how else could we think of them as devils unprovoked?

Very well, then we won’t think of them as devils.

“That won’t solve the problem,” Dongfang Yanxu said with a gentle shake of her head.

Yes. Even if they aren’t devils, the problem remains.

Because they don’t know what we’re thinking.

Suppose they know that we’re not devils?

The problem still exists.

They don’t know what we’re thinking about them.

They don’t know what we’re thinking about what they’re thinking about us.

That carries on in an endless chain of suspicion: They don’t know what we’re thinking about what they’re thinking about what we’re thinking about what they’re thinking about what we’re…

How can this chain of suspicion be broken?

Communication?

On Earth, perhaps. But not in space. Some people must die, or everyone will die. This is the unwinnable dead hand that space has dealt for the survival of Starship Earth. An insurmountable wall. In the face of it, communication has no meaning.

Only one choice is left. The question is who makes that choice.

Dark. It’s so fucking dark.

“We can’t delay any longer,” Dongfang Yanxu said decisively.

No more delays. In this dark region of space, the duelists are holding their breath. The string is about to snap.

Every second, the danger grows exponentially.

Since it’s all the same no matter who pulls it, why not pull it ourselves?

Then Akira Inoue suddenly broke the silence: “There’s another choice!”

We sacrifice ourselves.

Why?

Why us?

The three of us could, but do we have the authority to make this choice on behalf of the two thousand people on Natural Selection?

The three of them were standing on a knife blade. Though its cuts were painful, a jump off either side would be into a bottomless abyss. These were the labor pains for the birth of the new space humans.

“How about this?” Levine said. “First lock in the targets, and then think it over some more.”

Dongfang Yanxu nodded. Levine called up a control interface for the weapons system in the air and opened up the window for the infrasonic H-bombs and carrier missiles. On a spherical coordinate system with Natural Selection at the origin, Blue Space, Enterprise, Deep Space, and Ultimate Law were displayed as four points of light two hundred thousand kilometers away. The distance masked the structure of the targets, for at the scale of space, everything was just a point.

But the four points of light were ringed with four red halos, four deathly nooses indicating that the weapons system had already locked on the targets.

Stunned, the three of them looked at each other and shook their heads to say that it wasn’t their doing.

Apart from them, privileges to place a target lock in the weapons system were also held by the arms control and target screening officers, but their lock placement had to be authorized by the captain or vice-captain. That left just one other person with direct privileges to lock a target and launch an attack.

We’re idiots. He’s only someone who’s changed history twice!

He realized all of this first!

Who knows when he realized it? Maybe when Starship Earth was founded, or even earlier, when he learned that the combined fleet had been destroyed. He is the last to show worry. Like the parents of his era, always keeping their children in mind.

Dongfang Yanxu flew across the spherical hall as fast as she could, followed closely by the two vice-captains. They went out the door and down that long corridor until they arrived at the door to Zhang Beihai’s cabin. Suspended in front of him was an interface identical to the one they had just seen. They rushed forward, but the scene from Natural Selection’s escape replayed itself: They crashed into the bulkhead. There was no door, just an oval-shaped area where the bulkhead was transparent.

“What are you doing?” Levine shouted.

“Children,” Zhang Beihai said, the first time he had addressed them this way. Even though his back was turned, they could imagine that his eyes were as calm as water. “Let me do this.”

“You mean, ‘If I don’t go to hell, who will?’[5] Is that it?” Dongfang Yanxu said in a loud voice.

“From the moment I became a soldier, I was prepared to go there if necessary,” he said, continuing with the weapons’ prelaunch operations. From outside, the three of them saw that while he wasn’t skilled at these operations, every step he took was correct.

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Translator’s Note: This popular quotation sums up the great vow of the bodhisattva Ksitigarbha (Dìzàng Púsà) not to achieve Buddhahood until all living beings are saved.